We are moving into the final two weeks of school before the winter break. It will become very busy with the Speakers Series and Peace Festival. The Speakers Series is based on global citizenship and service. The Peace festival committee organizes this event bringing in people from in and around the Calgary area to showcase their organization. In the past we have had guests from animal rescue organizations to those that aid the homeless in our city. The focus for the Peace Festival is "Kindness" and all the activities will be centered around that theme. The grade 9 students organize fun ways for the school community to come together and interact in positive ways. We will send out more information in regard to the Speakers Series and Peace Festival as the information comes forward.

Thank you to all the parents, grandparents and siblings who shared their time and innovative approaches with the Sword of Knowledge extension POW questions. As mathematicians we are always exploring strategies that are the "right" fit for how our minds work. Some may find that their support people do things differently but end with the same result. We recognize that this is a wonderful discovery and appreciate how others work through a problem. Some students were thrilled to use the information that you shared with them, while others are still exploring other options for showing their thinking process. We encourage you to continue working through the math problems together to build that support system and for the students to recognize that "Parents are Partners" in their learning. As the school year progresses we will find more and more inventive strategies for all areas of the math curriculum. In science, we continued to explore simple machines (wheels, axles, levers, pulleys, gears, inclined plane, wedge and screw), using the Lego and K'Nex kits. With this being the second week building the students are becoming more comfortable with the concepts of simple machines and how they interact with each other to form a more complex machine.

In Humanities this week, fourth graders submitted their Pic Collages showcasing what they think makes Alberta unique. Along with these collages, students submitted a self graded rubric and explanation.

Because students were so diligent in completing and handing in their pic collages, we were afforded time to begin brainstorming for our upcoming Alberta poetry assignment. Grade four classes were brought together (in groups of 50) and discussed the poem, "Sea Fever" by John Masefield. Students noted that the poem used strong word choice and the pattern of adjective+noun+verb to create vivid images in the readers mind. They also noticed that the poem used the technique of personification to give the ideas life. Students were then put into groups to develop word banks for each of the 6 natural regions of Alberta. Each group of 5 students was made up of group members from different classes. These groups were asked to decide on 4 nouns for each region and brainstorm as many adjectives and verbs for each noun as possible. These word banks will be used in the coming weeks to aid in student's development of Alberta poetry assignments. They will be posted in each Humanities classroom.

Students have been tasked with writing a poem that illustrates their understanding of strong word choice, adjective+ noun + verb sequence, personification and mood. Grade fours can choose how many regions are written about in their free verse poems but will need to include a minimum of 6 lines. On Thursday, we began developing a rubric together for this assignment.In the coming weeks, we will also begin to explore the question "How does where you live affect how you live?"